Inhuman Ethics

For some time now I’ve felt both ashamed and haunted by a request to participate in The Inhumanities/Speculative Heresy cross-blog event. As announced over at The Inhumanities:

While speculative realism has critiqued anthropocentrism in ontology, and critical animal studies has critiqued anthropocentrism in ethics, there has yet to be many productive connections made between the two. With each offering the other important insights, the question to be asked is, what is the relation between ethics and ontology? Does a realist ontology require the suspension of any ethical imperatives? Can ethics and norms be grounded in something real? Are nonhuman actors capable of ethical relations?

Now if I have felt both ashamed and haunted by this invitation, then this is because, in response to this event, I failed miserably, failing to participate. However, in a number of respects, this failure to participate alludes to a far more symptomatic point in my own philosophical project revolving around the questions of ethics. If I did not see fit to participate in this event, then this is because I sensed in these questions the magnitude of the questions that face object-oriented ontology in relations to the questions proposed above. For the speculative realist turn, while presenting itself essentially as a militant epistemological and ontological intervention in the field of contemporary philosophy, above all raises the question of how ethics and politics must be rethought in light of the speculative turn. In light of the manner in which object-oriented ontology and flat ontology transforms our understanding of the place of the human within the chaosmos, massive transformations are called for within the problematic fields of both ethics and political theory.

read on!

It was this anxiety and trembling that was recalled to me with Nikki’s questions today about Latour and trials of strength. At present I am, at this point, no closer to articulating a coherent theoretical response to the questions raised by The Inhumanities. However, what is at issue here is not, at this moment, the formulation of a coherent theoretical response, but rather a posing of the question or the adequate posing of the problem which must subsequently guide ethical and political inquiry. It is not until the nature of the problem is adequately posed that the question of ethics and politics in the wake of object-oriented ontology will be capable of being adequately posed and a corresponding theory formulated. And a large part of the issue here will be the question of what an anti-correlationist ethics and politics might look like. Can we go so far, onticology will ask, as to even formulate an anti-correlationist ethics and politics? Will philosophy finally, at last, become capable of rescuing even ethics, aesthetics, and politics from their exclusive restriction to the domain of the human? Will, in other words, it become possible to think nonhuman actors as genuine actors without reducing them to props in dramas of human interest and without portraying ourselves as gracious sovereigns that wave our hands in acts of dispensation deigning to concern ourselves with animals, rocks, planets, elements, etc., such that we “rescue” them from their reduction to our consumptions? Will, in short, will we be able to get over ourselves and our own self-inflated sense of our place in the world and being? Even for the Marxists among us, among whom I count myself by virtue of the fact that Marxism, hands down, has the most accurate characterization of our historical moment, we will have to ask ourselves do we have the fortitude to formulate the possibility of a communism of human and nonhuman beings, or will we remain in the rut of human emancipation alone, pretending that the human, even in the face of Althusser’s protestations of a process without a subject, is nonetheless the exclusive domain of a modernist human emancipation? When will we be able to finally concede that we do not know even what we ourselves are and that the very fact of our relations calls into question the univocal determination of our essence. When will we finally be capable of moving beyond the Philosophical Manuscripts to Capital… And beyond?

Here, as always, the question is not one of excluding the human or denigrating the human. Rather, the issue is one of ousting the human from its occupation of the center, from its point of privilege, from its alleged exclusive right to legislate the domain of value. If flat ontology means anything, it does not mean the exclusion of the human and cultural, but rather the militant overturning of any theological pretension to treat humans as the Lord, center, or master of being. Humans are among being, not at the top of being. And against reactionary mentalities that would ask “why would I be interested in a philosophy that isn’t centered in the human”, flat ontology and object-oriented ontology responds that your conception of yourself is a narcissistic illusion, that you cannot even begin to understand what you are qua human, subject, cultural subject, and valuing being so long as you refuse this wound to your narcissism and encounter your amongness rather than lordship within being. Spinoza will proclaim that we don’t know what a body can do, and to this we object-oriented ontologists will add that we don’t even know what a human is. So far all we have are flattering mirrors borne of defense formations.

But to ears trained on the seductive siren song of rule based ethics, on the “somnolerific” drug of judgment, all of these questions, whether from the speculative realists and their Quixotic Lauruellian spider web spinning, or from the object-oriented ontologists, will resonate as strange and bizarre, for, based on the fact/value distinction that guides the destiny of all Modernist thought, it will prove impossible to see or discern what relevance ontology and epistemology could possibly have to questions of ethics, politics, and aesthetics. And here I evoke the word ethics intentionally, rather than morality, to distinguish the nature of these questions from all rule based moralities that issue from web spinners that apparently never separated from their mothers and fathers, yearning as they do for a system of commands and rules that might render the opacity of the world navigable. No, here ethics should be read philologically and homonymously, resonating like the strings of a cello with connotations of hexis, economy, and the household. But hexes, economy, and the oikos must be liberated from their human centeredness, being given ontological signification, where humans are both housed among being and within being without being at the top of being.

If the questions raised by the speculative realists and the object-oriented ontologists are destined to resonate so strangely in the ears of the normo-maniacs, then this is because the axiomatic that governs the normo-maniac discourse whether in its untilitarian or deontological formulation is nothing less than the endless bleating of the sheep on its way to the slaughter-house about the constitutive gap and distinction between the domain of facts and values. In short, the normo-maniac will find the idea that ontology or questions about what is could have any bearing on questions of normativity or ethics. Of course, the normo-maniacs never understood ethics to begin with, but only echoing commandments transformed into a formalistic command of parental commandment. But setting aside the pleasures of ad hominem attacks on these sad and irrelevant souls, what is always missed among the normo-maniacs is the point that this fact/value distinction, so foundational for all discourses since the Enlightenment up to and including the nihilistic materialists, is always based on an implicit ontological thesis. That is, this distinction can only get off the ground when it is taken as axiomatic and without a rigorous concept, that there is a univocal determination of the category of the human, or alternatively the “subject” (the new mantra of crypto-humanism and the new theology), that is the sole domain of value or the normative, carefully separable from the indifferent (i.e., “valueless”) domain of facts.

But what object-oriented ontology, departing from the Enlightenment separation of nature and culture, calls so deeply into question is whether it is possible to localize a site for such a category. Here, above all, it is necessary to follow the indications of Latour’s most radical thesis: every new relation is a new object. Now this thesis requires careful philosophical scrutiny and critique. Despite the valiant effort of Harman to crown Latour with the crown of philosopher– a philosopher, no less, capable of sustaining us for the next 100 years –we suspect that Latour the philosopher is more Harman’s creation than the work of Latour. This is a compliment to Harman’s creativity and humility. Moreover, Harman himself senses that perhaps there is something problematic in this thesis and that it is necessary to distinguish between those relations that are genuinely “object-generative” and those relations, as the tradition would say, that are merely “external”.

Nonetheless, in the radicality of this thesis a new space is opened for ethical, political, and aesthetic deliberation for we can no longer be sure of what we are saying when we refer to the human. And if this is the case, then it is because we do not yet know whether, and the conditions under which, a relation forms a new entity. But if this is the case, the beguiling, univocal distinction between the domain of facts and the domain of values completely collapses as it is no longer possible to refer to a single category that could be separated from the in-different domain of the natural. Is a human with a hammer still a human? Or is it something else? What of a human with a computer? What of a human with fossil fuels? What of a human with birth control? What about humans that sustain themselves on genetically engineered beakless chickens? It is necessary to here take a page from Donna Haraway.

The point is that the smooth divisions that would allow us to distinguish domains of facts and values now, with Latour’s thesis, break down. And as a consequence, the domain of the axiological finds that it overflows the dikes and dams that previously, though illusorily, hemmed it in to an ideological space where some alleged entity called the human was able to decree all value. Yet all of this must be rigorously posed, articulated, at the ontological level to even begin formulating these axiological questions.

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14 Responses to “Inhuman Ethics”

levi, while i first winced in reading the start of this post, after reading where this brought you i am both further challenged and humbled. i agree that a “a posing of the question or the adequate posing of the problem” is what is needed. my dissertation work on mitsein, via heidegger, took a sharp turn last year after reading latour as the questions of being-with must necessarily be reformulated in light of his understanding of both the modern constitution and recent developments in object-oriented ontology. and yet ethics seems impossible here because the very effort is anthropocentric as it is human being that is defining the terms of relation unless the very term ‘ethics’ is a redefinition of itself as well – (and then, with derrida, we might ask why keep such a problematic word in use? though this is a sideline…) – or if we were to confine the use of ethics, as a term, to the domain of human being in relation to all other being. it’s lopsided and inadequate, but beyond that can we do anything but stall as we wait for plants, animals, minerals and otherwise to give us a response that goes further than ‘life giving’ and ‘death inducing’?

maybe it’s too early in the day for me to be thinking this through, but i really appreciate the direction you are moving in and your willingness to bring out the need for the questions.

I would follow Marx and say that they are grounded in something real, namely (human) class society. “The dominant ideas of the age are the ideas of the ruling class” and all that. If that holds, then our ethical task is to create the real something that will establish a new ethics (a new relation?). Again, I think the recent work of Raymond Geuss is instructive here.

Flat ontology is the way to proceed because – as our ecological catastrophes make clear – the bringing-about of a new “real something” cannot be centered on the human, a more incoherent concept every day.

I’m not familiar with the work of Geuss, can you recommend anything? I’m rather tickled by this idea of a “communism of actants”, where Marxist or communist thought would have to become the thought of both human and nonhuman actants. I think one of the consequences of this line of thought is that the domain of the political can no longer be treated strictly as an issue of class (class would have to be thoroughly reinterpreted), but would have to open on to realms outside of what we ordinarily conceive as the social (i.e., human-centered). Part of what makes such a line of thought possible is the ontological thesis that the “human” is a sort of myth that fails to recognize the assemblic or assemblaged nature of objects that generate new objects. In a word, it cannot be said that there’s this one thing, the “human”, that simply is what it is independent of technologies, natural materials (the word “resource” already pre-judges the nature of these materials), the animal and so on. Rather, in entering into assemblages with these “nonhuman” actors new actors are formed. As a consequence, the ethical cannot be treated as a domain restricted strictly to the human because, as Lacan might quip, “the human does not exist”.

Aren’t the rationalizations we use to define and defend our treatment and use of animals in some sense, an extension of class generated norms? Does it mean going beyond Marx to include ‘nonhuman’ actors–or only while the direction of power extends in one direction–from the top down? By granting exploited classes equality, the direction of power becomes multi-directional, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t extending ethical foundations beyond the limits we’ve made to define the ‘human,’, redefine the direction of power in a similar way? In other words…is there a Marxist understanding of class robust enough to take in these additional questions–though they may have never occurred to Karl?

I recommend his Outside Ethics and Philosophy and Real Politics. Read the latter if you only have a little time. I read Geuss before I ever stumbled upon this blog, but I sense some overlapping concerns, namely escaping the finitude-obsessed Kantian framework. Princeton University Press has put up the introductions to both books for free. Here’s a link:

Regarding your comments, I will have to reply later because I have to go. Suffice to say I’m in broad agreement, but I think we need to be cautious about which actants need strengthening and which need to be diminished in our politics.

Maybe this is all pointing in the direction of an Aristotelian virtue ethics, where the Good would compel us to strengthen certain practices.

Yikes Kaibosworth, that’s not all the case. In my view Haraway is a key thinker in the context of OOO. I get the feeling that a lot of her work emerged at the wrong time in intellectual history (the height of postmodernity during the 80s and 90s). Her work somewhat fits with that postmodern context and she has described it at very points herself in those terms, but really I think the intellectual context just wasn’t yet primed for the sort of theory she was developing. A parallel case occurred with Latour in philosophy. At any rate, I think the situation has changed significantly and her work is ripe for rediscovery.

Exactly Jacob… This is precisely why I say the concept of class needs a rethinking in non-anthropocentric terms (which isn’t to say it would exclude the “human”, only that it wouldn’t be restricted to the human). We could even go one step further and ask whether this communism of actants could even be expanded or extended to “non-animate” actors like planets, stones, etc. For example, suppose Mars is lifeless. Does that entail that it is a free space to be exploited or does it itself enjoy a certain dignity and set of ethical relations in our relating to it?

AMM, were you in my class today? I was waxing on about eudaimonia and arete (later translated into “virtus” by the Romans and then becoming “virtue” for us) and its connotations of power (capacity, ability, “able-to”), power, and tendency striving towards actualization. This led to a discussion of everything from the virtus of stones and hawks to human life. At any rate, yes, I agree, the issue of ethics is not that of a set of constraints on what is acceptable to do, but rather pertains to what is worth doing and intensifying or, as you put it, strengthening.

[…] is on to something here (which comes as no surprise as I recently suggested something similar in comments to my post on Inhuman Ethics). In the world of cultural studies and the humanities, I think there […]

Does a flat ontology not suggest that all ‘hierarchies’ are organized from a falsely omniscient vantage that contradicts its own singular-plurality of self? No less laconically, does all suffering occur ‘within’ a temporal space where its ‘your-ness’ or ‘mine-ness’ ceases to be relevant and hierarchies of torment are merely the thermometers of one’s own feverish experience? That is, in the same way that you have still read Ulysses, even if you don’t know it, you still hear din of the abattoir.
-Dylan Ravenfox

“Flat ontologies, as I understand them, certainly seek to avoid the omniscience you describe, but the do have to contend with this fold: the ones who institute the ontologies are also actors, are also involved and they thus create a new network, neither higher than nor lower than any other.

But say more please: how do you move from hierarchies (no privilege granted to human access to beings over and above any others as an ontological ground of disclosure) to hierarchies of torment (some suffer, others enjoy, others are culpable, others aren’t)? If we grant no ontological privilege to any entity, neither to human animals nor to non-human animals nor to dust nor to bicycle pumps, can we still have an ethics? Or are ethics and ontology incommensurable? No ethical ontology. And no ontological inquiry that would ground ethics.”
-John Muse

“Yes. But the flow of the argument from “hierarchies” to “hierarchies of torment” may perhaps be misguided even before the in-parenthetical disclosures repeat their sacrificial logic. At this crucial turning point, perhaps one does stumble upon the sense that ontology must destroy itself on one side in order to re-make itself on the other, and that the ‘right morality’ tends to drown under flood of that force like a tumble weed in a hurricane. And yet, perhaps there is a way that the logic of a gift, like a vegan fruitcake, that could provide Ethics with its own grounds in that metempsychosis or anamorphosis, and thence take a leap of faith, in order to subject itself to its own peaceable form of cannibalism. More simply, perhaps the taxonomies of ontology might be raked in the fall like dead leaves, and gathered into a new artifice which sacrifices sacrifice according to a different economy, one without the blood, without the loss, without having to ‘pay’ for it (and pay one does!).

But that is all just dust.

If one discovers that there is really only one book, and that book is the book of one self, and furthermore, that it is a very bad book, then one must begin to grapple with the paradox that the judger of the book is merely the book itself.

But That’s Okay

Because vegetables are okay. The worst thing about eating a vegetable–the wheel chair of course– isn’t all that bad.

EW!”

“Hey, D. I appreciate this: “If one discovers that there is really only one book, and that book is the book of one’s self, and furthermore, that it is a very bad book, then one must begin to grapple with the paradox that the judger of the book is merely the book itself.” At the end I expect something different: the book necessarily contains its own judgment, and since the book still exists, the judgment could never condemn the book itself. We’re in Borges territory here.

But still: between ethics and ontology is there a between? An order? A relation? Does doing the right thing require knowing something? Or does one do in order to make what is, without grounds?”

“I think that between ethics and ontology there is an “and” at the intersection where ‘is’ meets ‘ought’! There must be the former before the latter can become relevant? I would like to hear how you struggle with that twist on this mobius strip. I for one struggle with it strugglingly, feeling that the verticies of ontology, ethics, and aesthetics crash together in a climax of this: there can be no should without already is. But when describing anything, one gets the sense that one makes shoulds!

Is that stories begin in naturalism and end in postconstructionism?

So in response to your question about ‘rightness’ and ‘knowing’ (which I think is a great pithy question) I think that I would like to say yes, you do sort of have to know something, which in this context I can only approximate with a reference to postanimality.

Of course, how can people who do not know this thing be acting ‘immorally’? I don’t think they are. But I think that I might be, according to my own sense of duty(!), if I do not try to show what I have seen . . .